Europe: EFSA awards duo for app

Loana Furcoi and Roberto Capuano have won first prize with ‘EFSA to the people’, an app that uses optical character recognition technology to perform queries on EFSA’s website and retrieve information.

The duo received the grand prize of €20,000 (US$22,474.91).

The European Food Standards Agency (EFSA) ran the hackathon competition for developers and designers from Europe to create an app that gives easy access to the authority’s work.

EFSA IT specialists will now trial the app with a view to having it up and running by next year.

“Innovation for EFSA is not just a fancy word. It is one of the main drivers of our strategy 2020 and is crucial for keeping pace with globalization and the increasing complexity of science,” says executive director Bernhard Url.